Venetia Murray’s novel The Twelve Days of Christmas (1968) has a reputation for being a cult novel, though I suspect that’s largely due to a certain passage that’s been quoted several times in potpourri books by Jilly Cooper and others. It comes from a scene in which two lovers are laying in bed in a discreet Paris hotel after making love. “I need some new pants,” the woman tells the man, which leads him to do a quick bit of the kind of mental calculus that’s one price of carrying on an affair:
After all, having committed himself to all this expenditure, he might as well get the best of it. And pants cost less than some things. But he was not looking forward to the moment when they would walk together down the Faubourg St Honoré. A happy thought occurred to him. Tomorrow was Sunday and the shops in the Rue St Honoré would be closed both on Sunday and Monday. This Sarah had forgotten. He realized this meant that he would have to keep her in bed for most of today.
Sarah is Sarah Yeates, in line to become Lady Yeates whenever her grandfather the Earl dies. The man is Simon Burford, a married publisher who’s told him wife that he’s attending a French publishing conference in Lyons. Which is just the sort of thing that French publishers organize … five days before Christmas.
But amorous complexities and moral quandries are the warps and woofs of Venetia Murray’s fictional fabric in The Twelve Days of Christmas. Sarah is divorced from her third husband and has had so many affairs that during her Paris getaway she has to stay two steps ahead of herself to avoid leading her current lover into someplace she’s been with one of the others. For Paris and London are small towns when it comes to people of their class and amatory habits:
There had been a memorable occasion in some restaurant in the King’s Road, where too many people who had crossed currents in their lives too often, had all run into each other having dinner at separate tables. Henry’s ex-wife had been there; she had been with a man with whom Suzy had once had an affair. Catharine had been there with someone she should not have been there with, since she was supposed to be a respectable married woman even if her husband was once again away. Some irrelevant Italian girl was there.
With so many matchings and mismatchings going on, some irrelevant man or woman is bound to find themselves the leftover in such scenes. When Simon flies off to Paris — sorry, Lyons — Catharine, his wife (second marriage for each) heads off to a psychedelic party at the Ritz and winds up falling for Mark, a novelist and leftover man. The party is being thrown by Catharine’s ambiguously trans(Atlantic) friend Elizabeth, who’s wealthy enough to persuade the management of the Ritz to look past the stoned half-naked bodies that litter the floor of her suite at the end of the party.
The Twelve Days of Christmas is certainly an artifact of the Swinging Sixties, but the irony is that the lion’s share of the licentiousness is in the hands of the monied/salaried/mortgaged thirty-somethings. Perhaps this is because the book is very much a roman à clef. According to Murray’s obituary in the Guardian, it was “a thinly disguised and pungent portrait of young, spoilt marrieds playing around in London in the early 1960s.”
At the time Murray wrote the book, she was between her second and third marriages and was part of a social set whose interconnections — marital, sexual, familial, and professional — were easily as intricate as any in the novel. The granddaughter of the renowned classicist and humanist Gilbert Murray and daughter of the journalist and politician Basil Murray (rumored to be the model of Evelyn Waugh’s character Basil Seal), Venetia Murray had been among the more privileged child evacuees of Blitz, spending most of the war living with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and his wife in Washington, D.C. and attending the exclusive Potomac School for girls.
When she was 18, she stayed with the novelist Nancy Mitford in Paris so she could attend a gala ball. Mitford wrote of Venetia to Waugh:
I’ve got a Beauty of 18 coming tomorrow which is a lovely treat, she came with her mother to buy a ball dress, which she has duly done, & I’ve persuaded the mother to leave her with me for a few days. She is called Venetia Murray, daughter of my dear old drunken cousin the late Basil M & she is an old fashioned Beauty, that is to say rather large & in a perpetual state of puppy like ecstasy which I find very attractive — like a puppy which wags itself rather than its tail.
Murray attributes to her character Sarah an incident that took place during her stay with Mitford:
Once upon a time when Sarah had been very young and in Paris she had been allowed, though only sixteen, to go to a ball with some young people. But she had been told to be back by twelve. She had been staying with her god-mother, a witty and well-known novelist but not a connoisseur of the behaviour of young girls. Sarah arriving back from the ball at five — in face she had only been having fun, not doing anything that in those days people like her god-mother would have called “wrong” — had run across the large courtyard in her ball gown, aware of how late she was. Her god-mother had been waiting up, worried that Sarah, in her charge, might have done something “wrong.” Her god-mother had said, “What is the use of running the last hundred yards when you are five hours late?”
I suspect that anyone familiar with the goings-on of London literati in the 1950s and 1960s could find many other examples of Murray’s appropriation of real-life characters and situations. Simon and Catherine rent a bedroom in their North London house to Suzy, an arrangement that sounds similar to the one Murray and Sally Newton, daughter of the actor Robert Newton, had in the house owned by poet and cricket writer Alan Ross. An annotated edition of The Twelve Days of Christmas would, in fact, likely be a valuable piece of social and literary history. As a work of fiction, however, it’s amusing but superficial — in its way as dated as a Regency romance (Murray later became a historian of the Regency) — and not a 1960s counterpart to Waugh’s early novels about the Bright Young Things of 1920s London.
